


Grave Robber

by TheCookieOfDoom



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood Magic, Halloween, M/M, Necromancy, Spooky, Stilinski Family Feels, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:22:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27317698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCookieOfDoom/pseuds/TheCookieOfDoom
Summary: Peter Hale died saving his mate.
Relationships: Mitch Rapp & Stiles Stilinski, Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 33
Kudos: 186





	Grave Robber

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween! I didn't end up finishing Unwanted Inheritance, since I decided I didn't want to rush myself. Then I remembered an older idea I had a while ago, and decided to write this little thing! 
> 
> Enjoy~

It’s been three weeks since Peter Hale died.

Stiles had yet to give up hope that he would still come back. How long had it been the first time, after Derek killed him, before Lydia brought him back to life? It took almost the whole summer. Three weeks was nothing compared to that.

Except Stiles called Lydia every day hoping for news, and she never once felt a compulsion to raise Peter a second time. Stiles could hear in her voice that she was relieved because of it.

After the first week, Stiles couldn’t bear to stay in the apartment he shared with Peter. After seven days, he couldn’t keep telling himself that Peter was just away for a while, and would be home soon. He couldn’t keep denying that Peter was _dead,_ buried in the ground in a sterile casket that Derek picked out, because Stiles was too beside himself to help make funeral arrangements.

He didn’t attend the funeral.

Stiles couldn’t stay in the apartment, but he couldn’t move back home, either. Not because he wasn’t welcome; hell, his dad was practically begging Stiles to come back home. None of them wanted to leave him alone in his grief. But Stiles didn’t go home. He couldn’t stand the way his dad looked at him, constantly haunted by the concern in his father’s eyes, the _understanding._ As if he had any idea what Stiles was going through.

How could he? He had _time._ Claudia’s looming death was announced months before it actually happened, given them time to make their peace with it. To say all they needed to say, so that when the time came, they could tie up all their loose ends in a neat little bow.

One day Peter was alive, and then he wasn’t. Ripped from Stiles’ life. He never even got to say goodbye.

Their home became a mausoleum. Untouched. Not so much as a book out of place from how it had been left that day when Peter—foolish, selfish, Peter—picked the wrong moment to be selfless, protecting Stiles with his life.

Derek took up the responsibility of dealing with the apartment, and that was probably for the best. Stiles didn’t have the first idea what needed to be done with it. All he knew was that he didn’t want it sold. He didn’t want it empty. It had to be ready for them to return when Peter finally came back to him, because Stiles knew he would. It was just a matter of time. Raising yourself from the dead—or manipulating someone else into doing it for you—took time.

Derek also offered to let Stiles stay with him at the loft. He had a spare bed ever since moved out, gone with Argent to France. He wasn’t eager to fill it. But he was also the alpha, and that meant taking care of his pack members when they were in need. Stiles knew Derek didn’t really want him around, though, and he didn’t blame the wolf. He was grieving his uncle, and Derek had always preferred to be alone in his suffering.

Besides, even if Derek wasn’t just offering out of obligation, Stiles still would have refused. Every time he went over to the loft, all he could think about was the many late nights he’d spent there with Peter, bantering back and forth over research. Sometimes he could almost see his lover from the corner of his eye, but Peter was always gone when Stiles tried to look, ripped away all over again. Everywhere Stiles went, he was surrounded by reminders of his loss.

The greater hurt, though, was that Stiles had no one to talk to. Derek, the only one that understood even a fraction of his pain, would never talk to Stiles of all people about his feelings. Scott tried to be supportive for Stiles’ sake, but he couldn’t hide his relief that Peter was gone. That was an old grudge that never faded, even though it’s been almost four years since he was bitten, and Peter has more than proven himself an ally to the pack.

Lydia was glad to have him gone as well, but she was more tactful about it than Scott. She knew what Peter meant to him, and even if she didn’t agree with their relationship, she could respect Stiles’ pain. She knew that when Stiles lost Peter, he felt like a part of himself died along with him.

In the end, Stiles moved in with his brother, Mitch. They weren’t as close as they used to be. Then again, Mitch wasn’t close to anyone, anymore. After he went to college, he met the love of his life, a woman named Katrina, and subsequently lost her. He lost something in himself, too. All the light and warmth he’d once had painfully snuffed out by one random, mundane, tragic act of cruelty. He was the only one that understood Stiles’ pain.

***

“He’s coming back,” Stiles said, curled up on the couch with a blanket. He’d left almost all of his belongings at the apartment, everything except the essentials. The blanket was the only comfort item he’d thought to bring. It was a cheap Christmas gift from the mall, a soft plaid throw lined with white faux fur that still smelled like Peter’s cologne. Stiles closed his eyes and buried his nose in the warm fabric, breathing in the warm scent of it, and he could almost imagine Peter was still with him.

Mitch appeared, silent and wraithlike, to hand Stiles a cup of tea. Some herbal blend to dull the pain of his grief, because when Mitch went away to college, he’d apparently studied more than his required courses. When his brother came back, he was unrecognizable. Covered in self-inflicted black tattoos, runes and arcane markings carved into his skin. He didn’t laugh, or smile, and sometimes Stiles thought he didn’t even breathe for how quiet he was. Truly anathema to Stiles’ own loud presence. He swallowed up a room while Mitch faded into the shadows, an unseen specter.

Stiles took the cup, warmth seeming through the ceramic. When their hands brushed, Mitch’s skin was cold. Like a corpse.

“He did it before, he’ll do it again.” He would. It’s why Stiles kept the apartment as he left it, unwilling to change a thing. Even now, long after his untimely demise, when a thin film of dust covered their belongings. It needed to be how Peter left it.

“I know,” Mitch said.

“He’ll come back to me.” Peter promised he would always come back. He _promised._

Mitch didn’t say anything.

***

Lydia didn’t visit very often, and never for long when she did. Being around Mitch made her want to scream.

***

If Stiles treated Peter’s apartment like a mausoleum, a memorial to their life, then Mitch’s home _felt_ like one. The air inside was still and quiet, carrying the same deathly silence of a graveyard. The heavy, oppressive atmosphere made Stiles not want to breathe, just to avoid shattering that blanket of quiet. It was almost tranquil. Peaceful, even. A perfect reflection of its owner, who scarcely seemed to count himself among the living, anymore. He certainly never seemed to join them.

Mitch’s connection to the pack was tenuous at best. A single, frail thread connecting him to Stiles, and no one else. Like Peter, he was on the fringe, but he didn’t mind. He was only ever there for Stiles.

***

Mitch died on October 27th, three years ago.

Just after 10:00pm, Mitch set out for a graveyard. Not a cemetery, a carefully manicured place where the living went to grieve their dead, and themselves. A graveyard, with simple, rough-hewn headstones, many of the inscriptions worn away by time, their inhabitants faded from living memory. A forgotten place.

There was no moon that night, and the stars were hidden under a blanket of storm clouds. The weather channel predicted thunder and lightning, and a rainstorm to carry through the week.

Mitch picked his way through the headstones, careful to walk between the rows of graves out of respect to their occupants. He left a flower and a penny for each he passed, an offering for the forgotten dead, and felt more than saw the cool grey mist that poured in around his feet.

The graveyard housed several mausolea, that in turn housed the dead and their belongings, relics of a bygone era. Mitch found the oldest of them at the center of the graveyard and broke his way inside. The rusted iron shackle was weathered and rotted from over a century left to the elements, and came away easily. It landed heavily on the platform at the mausoleum’s entrance. The sound didn’t echo.

Mitch carried only a single candle inside a glass lantern for light. It cast long, grotesque shadows over the walls as he descended into the crypt, and the shadows beneath. As he walked down the narrow stairs, Mitch could feel cold breaths ghosting over the back of his neck, sending a shiver down his spine. He couldn’t shake the unmistakable feeling that someone just walked over his grave. Still, he pressed on.

A single tomb laid at the center of the crypt’s depths, with coffin-filled alcoves lining the walls, and sconces that have been dead since the mausoleum was sealed. Perfect.

Mitch climbed onto the platform and laid down. Cold seeped into him, the stone leaching the warmth from his body, making goosebumps rise along his skin. Frigid, dusty air filled his lungs. Motes danced in the light of his lantern until Mitch extinguished the flame.

Cast into sudden, all-consuming darkness, Mitch closed his eyes and let himself fall into an unconscious limbo between life and death.

He didn’t rise until four days later, clawing his way back out from the grip of death. It kept a single, cold hand around his heart, a constant presence that shadowed his every step.

***

Stiles woke with an agonized scream in the middle of the night, a forlorn cry like a banshee’s wail. A sound only a mourning lover could make. He soon realized it was only a nightmare that had woken him. A memory of the night Peter was taken from him, giving his life to save Stiles’ own. It wasn’t fair.

Mitch soon came to him with a fresh cup of tea. It was the only warmth his brother could provide, a numbing balm to Stiles’ raw nerves. Stiles didn’t want to be numb when the pain was the only reminder of Peter he still had. But he was so tired of hurting. He didn’t take the tea.

“Where is he,” Stiles cried, clutching his blanket around himself. Peter’s scent had faded from the fabric. Yet another hollow reminder. “Why hasn’t he come home?” _He promised, he promised, he promised._

“You can only cheat death once,” Mitch said, not unkindly. He sat beside Stiles on the bed and held him while he went, cold and stiff and corpselike, where Peter had always been so warm and full of life. Stiles clung to his brother for comfort anyway, reminded of when their mother died, and part of John died with her, and the only solace they had was each other. Perhaps they’d always been closely shadowed by death.

When Stiles’ sobs died down to pitiful sniffled and stuttered gasps, Mitch held the tea to Stiles’ lips, knowing his trembling hands were sure to spill it. Stiles didn’t want it. He drank the cold tea anyway. It settled heavily in his stomach, and the cold seeped into the rest of him, until it was all he could feel. Mitch laid him down to sleep and pulled the blankets up to his chest, a funeral shroud.

“It’ll be alright,” Mitch said, like an apathetic mortician consoling the bereaved. “You’ll be alright, Stiles.”

It’s been two months.

***

Mitch and Lydia were two sides of the same coin. Opposite polarizations of a magnet, meant to repel each other. Where he’d intentionally sought to become what he was, it was forced unwillingly upon her. Where she was an omen of death, he was its harbinger.

Ever since Peter’s death, a question has sat at the back of Mitch’s mind, eating away at him until he finally called his unfortunate counterpart. “Did you know Peter would die?” he asked when she answered.

“Everybody dies,” Lydia responded, cold, and giving nothing away. The only one that could match him for sheer apathy when she wanted to. It was telling that she chose to do so now.

“Lydia.” He knew she hated Peter, just as she knew he had every right. Mitch certainly couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t there in the early years when everything happened, but he’s heard the stories. Put together the pieces. They painted a very unflattering picture of Peter.

Stiles justified Peter’s actions towards the ones that had a hand in murdering his family, but what he did to Lydia… that was a black stain on their history for a long time, hindering Stiles from allowing their reluctant alliance to become something more.

Mitch needed to know if Lydia’s hatred for Peter outweighed her love for Stiles.

“No,” she sighed, sounding so weary. “I wouldn’t have hurt Stiles like that. If I’d known, I would’ve told him.”

Peter wasn’t supposed to die that night.

***

“I don’t want to live without him,” Stiles said one day. He sounded… hollow.

It’s been almost three months. In the weeks since Peter’s death Stiles has tried to return to normal, putting up a front for the sake of those around him. Pretending he was moving on like they all wanted. The only place he didn’t have to keep up the charade was Mitch’s apartment, where death was a constant companion.

“He would want you to.”

“Maybe not.” Stiles laughed like shattering glass and rubbed his eyes. He didn’t cry anymore, but sometimes he wanted to. He didn’t have any more tears to give. “He was selfish like that.”

Stiles knew Mitch was right, though. Peter wouldn’t have wanted to hold Stiles back. He was always the one pushing Stiles to be more, encouraging him towards bigger and better things, even when Stiles was perfectly content with his small, modest life. He was surrounded by the people he loved and that was all he needed.

“It doesn’t matter what he would want,” Stiles said. “He’s dead. He’s not coming back.”

***

For all his powers over the dead, Mitch couldn’t communicate with the ghost his brother has become.

Stiles haunted the apartment, a shade of his former self. He used to be so vibrant. Bright and loud and impossible to ignore. Now he was fading away, slowly disappearing from the lives of everyone that loved him. And there was nothing Mitch could do. He couldn’t take Stiles pain. Couldn’t breathe new life into him. He was helpless to watch as Stiles’ life bled out day by day, leaving him nothing more than a living specter. Something even less than what Mitch had become.

Until finally, he couldn’t sit idly by any longer, watching his dear brother waste away into nothing.

Three months to the day, Mitch went to the cemetery where Peter was buried alongside the Hale Memorial. He was the only one of his family to have his own grave. The only one with anything left to bury. He came armed with a tattered satchel full of supplies, and a shovel. Once the sun went down, he started digging.

It was six hours before Mitch finally managed to unearth the wooden casket encasing Peter’s remains. He didn’t bother unearthing all of it; only the upper half, enough for Peter to climb his way out. Mitch kneeled, panting and exhausted, damp soil sticking to his sweat-slick skin. Raising the dead was never an easy task.

He got up and used his shovel to drag his satchel into the grave, taking out a jar of some thick, muddy substance. He kneeled on the casket again, this time to paint symbols on the laminated red wood with wood ash and animal fat and turpentine and his own fresh blood. Then Mitch climbed his way out of the grave to finish setting up his ritual. He used the flat marble headstone as an altar to arrange his tallow candles and bone talismans around a black mirror—the scorched remains of an old pewter picture frame.

After a lengthy incantation the candles erupted into a blaze, nine pillars of fire that sought to ignite the heavens—then they snuffed themselves out when he finished. Thin, grey wisps of smoke rose from the charred cotton wicks. All he had to do now was wait.

Mitch scooped some of the grave dirt from the large mound into a 16oz mason jar—you could never have too much grave dirt—and stuffed it into his satchel with the rest of his supplies. He only left the candles on the headstone, waiting for the wax to cool.

Finally, Mitch lit up cigarette and stood leaning against his shovel, watching the grave.

***

On October 31st, Peter Hale crawled his way out of the ground for the second time in his life. This time he was buried in a casket; the thick, satin-lined laminated wood was bolted shut around him, air tight. He couldn’t breathe.

Peter barely had any room to move, and no light to see by. Even his sensitive eyes were blind in the darkness. Afraid, he clawed at the surface only inches from his face, until his claws were broken and his hands were bloody.

Splintered wood ravaged his arms as he broke through and dragged himself out of the casket, choking and gasping for air. It took longer than it should have for him to realize his grave had already been disturbed.

“About damn time,” came a voice from above. If Peter were the religious type, he might have thought it was the voice of God, giving him a second time. Instead, when he looked up, he found something even more believable.

Mitch.

“How… long…?” Peter asked. His voice was strangled and quiet, barely above a rasping whisper.

“Three months. Are you going to get out of there, or what? I don’t have all night.”

“Sti…les?”

“He’s fine.”

 _Of course he is,_ Peter thought. Stiles was strong. He wasn’t one to let himself become hindered by grief. _Is that why he isn’t here?_

“Seriously, are you going to make me come get you?”

Peter snarled. He dragged himself the rest of the way out of the casket and stood on unsteady legs, then jumped out of his grave. He landed on his knees at Mitch’s feet.

Mitch dropped a bundle of clothes in front of him. “Get dressed.”

“Why… are you… helping… me…?” Peter knew Mitch never liked him. He’d always made it clear his disapproved of Peter’s relationship with Stiles. And Peter’s constant need to antagonize the man never helped things. Why would Mitch bring him back?

“I’m not,” Mitch said coldly. “I’m helping Stiles.” 

While Mitch gathered his candles, Peter changed into his clothes. The suit he’d been buried him had splits down the back—easier to get onto a stiff corpse that way.

Peter looked at the sky. There was no moon looking back at him. He felt adrift without its pull to anchor him, but the stars offer a kind, warm glow in its absence. He closed his eyes and breathed in the cool, damp night air, so full of _life._ He never thought he would get to taste it again.

“You better thank your lucky stars Stiles loves you,” Mitch said in his usual irritated tone. Peter couldn’t bring himself to mind this time, because he was _alive,_ and that meant he could go back home to Stiles again. “If you _ever_ do anything to hurt him—”

“I won’t.” Mitch looked at Peter with the stony impassivity of death. He had no way to know whether Mitch believed him or not. Couldn’t read his chemo signals when Mitch only wore the same damp-earth scent of the cemetery, shrouded in death. But it was the truth.

“Give me your hand.” Reluctantly, Peter did. Mitch grabbed him by the wrist and pulled a dagger across his palm before he could react, making him his in pain. He clenched his hand, but Mitch didn’t let him jerk away. Instead he dripped his blood onto an amulet bound in leather and iron. It absorbed the offering and glowed a violent, lurid red, pulsing in time with Peter’s heart. “Do you know what this is?” Mitch asked when the bright glow faded into a cool, faint ember. Peter nodded.

A bloodstone binding.

Until Mitch saw fit to break the enchantment, Peter’s life would quite literally be in his hands. But if that was the price he had to pay to be with Stiles again, then Peter didn’t care. He’d already proven once before that Stiles was worth his life.

***

They left the cemetery just as the sun was beginning to rise over the horizon. Peter tilted his face into the warm rays and closed his eyes, basking in the warmth.

 _I’m coming home, Stiles,_ he thought. A deal was a deal, even with him; he always held up his end. Someway, somehow.

***

**To: Lydia (6:23 AM)**

_Peter’s back._

**From: Lydia (6:25 AM)**

_What did you do?_

**To: Lydia: (6:25 AM)**

_What I had to._

***

“He’s down the hall. First door on the right,” Mitch said, letting Peter into the apartment.

“I know.” Peter could pick out Stile’s scent beneath the layers of misery and death. He followed it to his love, finding Stiles sleeping like the dead. He kneeled beside the bed and traced his fingertips down Stiles’ pale cheek. “Wake up, sweetheart,” he whispered.

It was several long, agonizing seconds before Stiles opened his sad brown eyes, looking at Peter in confusion. “Peter?” For a brief, painful moment, hope brightened Stile’s face. Then it was replaced with cold disappointment. “You’re just a dream. Just a dream…”

“It’s me, Stiles.” He took Stiles hand and pressed a kiss to his cold palm. “I’m here. I’m real.”

“No. No, you can’t be. It’s got to be a trick,” Stiles insisted. Tears welled in his eyes and his bottom lip trembled, and Peter could only imagine what he was feeling after three months having to grieve. He intended to make sure Stiles never missed him again, not for a single day

Peter sat on the edge of the bed and pulled Stiles into his arms, breathing in the scent of him. Like dust and misery and, somewhere beneath it, home. Warmth. Mate. “It really is you,” Stiles whispered, limp and stiff in his arms. “You’re home.”

Stiles threw his arms around Peter and sobbed; from relief, from joy, from a dozen other emotions he’s buried over the past three months, unable to face them, all flooding him now that his numb shell has shattered. He cried and trembled and held onto Peter like he never wanted to let him go again, heedless of the dirt staining his skin, and Peter loved him so much he could hardly breath.

“Of course, dearest," Peter said, pressing a kiss to the top of Stiles head. “I promised.”

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact, necromancy is one of my favorite things to write about. I've always had at least one Necromancer OC since I was like... 9. And have studied real world Necromancy! When Mitch "dies" in that mausoleum, he's actually performing an initiation to become a fully fledged necromancer, and he comes back physically alive, but spiritually half-dead. What he does is creatively called "grave sleeping", and is similar to what Stiles and Co. did when they sacrificed themselves; temporarily sort-of dying with the intention to sacrifice himself and gain the attention of things lurking in the afterlife.
> 
> edit: plz... commente


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